BMC Helix ITSM Reviews

To manage the ITSM process in our organization and the organization's infrastructure via CMDB.

I have implemented and worked on this product at many customer sites. The way you can customize this product to adapt to the process the customer is already using is what sets this apart from other ITSM products out there. This helps customers to adapt to the tool pretty quickly.

The versatility and customizability of the product is what I like most. It provides a strong customization platform in the AR System.

The interface is one major complaint about this product. With the recent introduction of Digital Workplace and SmartIT products. I think BMC is finally going in the right direction on that front.

We use BMC Helix for application discovery and dependency mapping the area of the nCode. It's one of the best programs we've used. We usually serve around 10 to 20 customers with this solution but it's fewer than 10 now.

Many other tools are similar. I've used these tools and find that they meet my requirements. Helix is more lightweight than these tools. It's a traditional tool that was developed more than 10 years ago. Ease of use is the operative word.

Integration could be better. If something doesn't work well with some tools and operations, then management becomes difficult, so you have to integrate other tools.

We've been using Helix for at least 10 years.

It is very stable and scalable.

I haven't really done the installation, so I do not know how complex it is.

The license is yearly.

On a scale of one to 10, I would rate it a seven. Before adopting, I would recommend evaluating how well all the options are suited to your requirements.

The main valuable feature is the flexibility of the product -- the ability of being able to make it do almost anything we need it to do to adjust to our business needs and to do it very quickly. The time to deliver a finish product is fast.

We have been able to provide several fairly complex and deeply integrated fully customized applications within the different systems throughout the company in an extremely quick delivery time which is impossible with other products.

It has improved the life cycle of the development making it a lot shorter to go from the concept phase (requirements gathering) to the deployment portion.

We also have been able to provide a lot more applications to the businesses within to service them better. Improve their processes by automating a lot of their sticky notes and spreadsheets and other paper trails that they were using prior to the application being created.

I have been developing on ARS platform since 1998, but on this version since 2013.

Like any product/new versions there are always issues. The main ones are the undocumented features that comes with the customized applications. We are not using the out of the box application (ITSM) therefore we are thinking "out of the box" and BMC did not document all of the changes made in their different upgrades. So each time you upgrade from one version to another, you always run into these issues. You need to always make sure you do thorough testing of all the functionality you have in your different applications especially if you are "outside of the box" type of business.

We did and still have stability issues that we are working on. The issues are all linked to the BIRT reporting tool which was the solution recommended at the time by BMC. But we are now totally disconnecting from this tool. We have identify this as being the 100% culprit and are using other methods for doing what is required within our web applications.

But beside the reporting issue no. This is a solid system. We do however have a weekly scheduled reboot of our servers (Windows farm) just to be safe. But that is just because they are Windows :-)

But in all honesty, we need to always keep an eye on the amount of Handles being generated by all the services from the BMC AR System. They do from time to time run out of control and will require you to restart the services. But that is not a regular occurrence.

None. I haven't seen any limitation at all on this product. It is as good as the hardware will allow it to be. you just need to ensure you have the proper hardware/architecture to support what you need.

The Customer service is the same as always. It hasn't changed much. They will always be there to help you find the product to help you grow in your business.

BMC needs to keep improving their support. It is still far from what it was back in the days of Remedy. It is very sad that you still are asked for you logs when the logs are already been provided and that you are asked the same questions when those are already answered in the tickets. It is as if they are reading from a script like drones. They need to learn to be more proactive and less robots. When the tickets being raised already have all the details of the issues, and all the diagnostics have been done by us please send the details to second level or 3rd if necessary instead of asking us to repeat the steps we already repeated. we don't have time to waste, especially when a server is down. That is why we do not use BMC support at the moment.

We have been on BMC AR System platform here since the mid 90s. We keep adding more applications, modifying/updating the old ones.

We have retired some too. It is an easy platform to grow and adapt

I was not at this client site when the implementation was done. But from experience, I would suggest that anyone embarking in this adventure does get at least the basic training

BMC ARS was implemented back in mid 1990's . I was not at this client site when the implementation was done.

BMC ARS was implemented back in mid 1990's . I was not at this client site when the implementation was done.

I keep a close eye on license usage and balance them. The cost of license is always an issue in every company and needs to be evaluate every Quarter/Year.

A report is provided with the recommendation to each business units on what needs to be done.

BMC ARS was implemented back in mid 1990's . I was not at this client site when the implementation was done.

This is based on the older version of the product as we are slowly moving all our thick client apps to the Web. This has been a pain stacking process due to amount of applications we needed to move and to the multiple of "old" code we had to drag along with us. The next move will be the upgrade to version 9 which will be another huge and exciting step. This is an amazing powerful product, but like any product that has so much multi possibilities, it has its "quirkiness" that you need to learn to work with.

The solution is for all IT management. It takes care of the day-to-day operations and customers' policies. The initial implementation was to start creating a knowledge base and capture information as it happened. Then by using that knowledge base analysis and see what trends are occurring within the systems.

The most valuable features I have found to be the activity logs. Additionally, the other features where you are able to continuously address issues and are able to annotate notes inside to convey them to the customer. The customer can read the notes and are able to know where you are in the procedures and process of fixing the problem for them. It has a good interactive piece for dialogue with customers where you do not have to interact with them personally but they can do it on their own just by going into that activity log. This is great for the customer to have the ability to find out how things are being progressively taken care of.

The reports need improvement, it is not a good functioning tool. No one in my organization seems to be able to use the reports properly. I think it is a dysfunction in the product because there has to be a more simplistic form for building those reports to allow the extrapolation of information for trend analysis and other operations. You want to be able to pull information from a variety of sources to see how you are providing support to the customer, this is what your performance base is. This is why those reports are a significant piece of the equation. You need to be able to produce those right now. People would rather create spreadsheets on their own and just thumb through all kinds of time-consuming tasks, why not use the actual databases that are there to produce that information.  

I have been using this solution for many years.

When updates come out I am very hesitant when they put out a patch or an update because it disrupts some operations or functionality that is important. It makes it harder for us to readjust the solution and have to start implementing things all over again because the patches are not properly vetted.

I have found the solution to be scalable. However, other competitors products such as ServiceNow are more robust and scalable. We have many people using the BMC solution in the organization, service managers, individual managers, problem manager, vendors, and individual tiers 0-3. The amount of people is needed as we service over 60 thousand people.

The tech support is not consistent. You might get a good person to help you out and actually knows what he is doing or you get somebody who is trying to figure out a solution on their own. You both are left trying to figure out a solution together because you get the feeling you do not have the expertise that you should have for the product. When you initially make the calls, you have to break down the issue to such a deep level of explanation when it should be simplistic for them to understand. This causes some difficulties for the customer. This type of inexperienced customer service devaluates the product, this needs to be improved.

The maintenance of the solution is overseen by a staff of approximately seven people.

I am not sure the exact price we pay for the solution but I know it is in the high seven-figure amount annually.

I was trying to get my organization to use ServiceNow because it is more cloud-based. I have seen several demos of ServiceNow and I like the features that it has. It is more intuitive, easier to implement, define roles and manage.

I would advise others to consider other options before choosing this solution such as ServiceNow. 

I rate BMC Helix ITSM a four out of ten.

We mainly use it for service requests and incident management. It is being used for all problem tickets and change requests. We are using the latest version. 

We find the incident management module the best. The reporting part is also useful. We use a feature called smart reporting, and it is very beneficial for us.

Its performance can be improved. Sometimes, there is a performance issue, and it is a little slow and difficult on the usage side. It would be beneficial for us if there is a lighter version of this solution. 

There is also a limitation on the number of columns and memory for extracting a report, and this functionality can be improved.

We would like to have better integration and UI in this solution. The user interface should be easy to navigate. Its integration with other tools, such as SharePoint or Jira, can also be improved, which would be beneficial for us.

In terms of new features, there should also be a mobile version. The desktop version is available, but the mobile version is not available, which is one of the challenges that our team has. For users who work on Remedy and who raise the ticket, it would also be very beneficial to have some chatbot features.

I have been using this solution for the past four years.

Its stability is good.

We have around 7,000 users.

Their support is sufficient and fine as of now. Our interaction is currently minimal. We generally use the community portal to contact the BMC team. We are also looking for other tools, and we are mostly connecting with the technical team.

We used a tool called HEAT. We were also using the VPN version of Remedy that had to be installed on a system. We were not using the web-based version of Remedy.

We migrated to this solution because it is available on the web, and it is easy to access. The previous one had to be installed on a system. If you wanted to raise a ticket and work on the ticket, the user had to raise a request for installation. There were a lot of other things that had to be taken care of before using the solution. That is the reason we moved to BMC Helix ITSM.

The initial setup was simple. It took around six months to one year.

We took the help of a vendor. For maintenance, we have a separate Remedy team. The maintenance of the cloud part is taken care by the vendor team.

It is not very expensive and not very cheap. It is somewhere in-between. Some of the features are more expensive. 

There are also additional costs. If you want to use most of the features, you need to pay more.

I would recommend this solution because it includes all the best practices of ITIL and ITSM used across the industry. It is a good product.

I would rate BMC Helix ITSM an eight out of ten.

Overall, within our company, there are over 15,000 end-users and 400 incident management members using this solution.

You can do some customizing if you want, which is great. It's a very integrated solution. You have incident management, change management, release management, and asset management — all of these things work very well together.

Their customer service catalog (where a customer can order some products) could be improved. This product is not the best, but they are working on it.

It needs to be more comfortable for the end-user. You need to be able to order some products.

I have been using this solution for over ten years.

This solution is very stable.

It's very easy to scale. You can connect one server to another and scale them together if you want.

We have a support partner that handles all of our BMC support-related issues.

For us, the initial setup was complex because we needed a lot of customization done.

We have a team of four staff members, including myself, who look after all maintenance-related issues.

I would absolutely recommend BMC Helix ITSM. There are two solutions to look out for: BMC and ServiceNow. I think both solutions are great solutions but I can't say which one is better.

For a smaller company, a solution like JIRA Help Desk may be better. BCM can be quite complex as there are many modules that are not easy to handle.

Overall, on a scale from one to ten, I would give this solution a rating of seven.

If they improved the workflow and processes, simplified the initial setup, improved the UI, and the digital workplace catalog for the end-users, then I would give this solution a rating of 10. 

It's easy to customize and provides a range of features you can customize with practically no exceptions unlike its competing products like ServiceNow, etc. which have many limitations.

I have implemented this product at many customer sites and have been able to do so with an extremely quick turnaround. The development and customization timelines on the calendar were insignificant compared to the time needed to collect business requirement which is usually the constant and tool agnostic. No matter what solution you pick, understanding business requirements is a constant.

I can’t quite think of any areas that may require improvement – web services maybe as until v8 there was one small limitation which I think has been removed with the v9. It was possible to circumvent the limitation in previous versions by rewriting the WSDL.

We've been using BMC Remedy AR System and its ITSM suite products for about 17 years.

Not once in any of my deployments for the past 17 years. Bugs and issues like that yes, but nothing that was not resolved as quickly as it was found.

Just in a couple of releases after which they had to immediately release a SP to resolve those stability issues.

Scalability is one of BMC Remedy systems biggest strengths..

Fairly good. Much of it is in Asia and as in with most foreign customer support there is that occasional “understanding the accent” problem, but apart from that they are fairly good at what they do.

It's top notch.

I have had to use ServiceNow in between deployments, and think it is a much inferior solution to the BMC Remedy solution.

As straightforward as it can get for someone who knows the system.

I do the implementations myself.

From a technical viewpoint, I can only say it should be fairly good as you get exactly what they promise you no less. With many other solutions including ServiceNow that have better marketing teams than BMC Remedy does, they set the delivery expectations where they cannot possibly get due to technical limitations with the tool. BMC Remedy representatives however set the bar exactly where it should be and the product is able to deliver what they promise it can.

Since licensing can affect price of the overall solutions significantly especially for smaller businesses, I would recommend those that are interested in this solution to spend a tiny bit on third party applications you get that are designed to work with the BMC solution to monitor its usage and suggest the optimal numbers for licenses based on these statistics. It has been useful for a number of shops to save on their licensing costs significantly by not over budgeting for their licenses. These monitoring apps are legal to use and in fact have been displayed at BMC Remedy user group conferences and even won awards at some of those shows.

I had to evaluate ServiceNow which I feel has a long long way to go. Lucky for them they have invested in a very strong marketing team which has strengthened its product sales

Make sure you get a team that has the know how to implement this product. Like with all other things that are easy to use and easy to implement, it also is easy to muck things up when you have a team that does not know what it is doing. Find the right people, build a good implementation team, and more importantly, spend as much time as you can with the business analysis part making sure you get the implementation team involved in it. Do not sweat on the actual implementation. That part is the easy part once you have your requirements right.

It has complete coverage of ITIL processes and a rich functionality. Plus, it provides a strong customisation platform in AR System which is quite flexible.

BMC Remedy ITSM has been used both by the customers that I served as well as the software services companies that I actually worked for while serving those customers. In each case that I have seen so far, BMC Remedy has typically been implemented to transform multiple older ticketing systems into a centralised single IT ticketing system. In the case of telecom vendors, largely it is doing the job of network (operations support systems) ticketing and is integrated with variety of non-BMC applications. In each case, it has helped customers transform their applications stack and bring in a uniform, standardised process when compared to the past. This results in savings and streamlining of both people and processes.

The traditional UI of Remedy is somewhat of a weak point from the end user perspective. Also, from a developer perspective, a lack of version of management support unlike traditional programming languages such as Java/C# etc where you can easily create code lines, create branches/merge branches, create automated drops of code etc. One can't do this in Remedy in that manner. In general, Remedy doesn't support very aggressive Agile development and is more conducive to a waterfall kind of SDLC. Also, the debugging of defects or performance issues in Remedy is not well assisted by the Remedy Developer Studio.

I have been using BMC products for around nine years, since 2006. My experience includes older versions such as 7.0.1, and 7.6.03/04.

By itself the product is ok, but frequently people follow incorrect procedures while doing custom coding. BMC does provide guidelines to avoid this, but AR systems as such doesn't prevent you from coding in the incorrect manner, so such bad customisation can cause deployment/upgrade issues later. From versions 7.6.04 and 8.1 onwards, this is largely addressed due to the introduction of the overlay concept, but it is still not too easy to upgrade wherever you have heavy customisation.

Again the stability is frequently related to custom code rather than out of the box code. I don't think it is unusual for any application going live for the first time to be a bit unstable for the first two to three releases, at least after the first ever go-live.

Not much - it is highly scalable.

Customer service can vary wildly. With premier support from BMC, which is very expensive I believe, it can be quite fast and dedicated. But, if you have bronze, a basic service or worse, if you don't have direct service from BMC but only have access to them via some intermediate partner - then it may not always be smooth.

I have experienced service to both extremes - very good and not good at all! Currently I am driving a project that has premier support so it is quite good in this case. They helped a lot in sorting out upgrade related issues and we had a very smooth excellent upgrade from 8.1 patch 002 to SP2.

Typically our customers switched from other products such as Amdocs Clarify or People Soft or home grown ticketing applications to BMC Remedy because the older platforms were not supported by the original vendor anymore OR they found the older solution was not scaling to their needs. Plus, older ticketing functionality was typically fragmented across multiple applications - e.g. for incident management, they may use one application and a completely different application for change management and so on. Now, it is all within one suite which is much easier to handle.

BMC Remedy is set up for a real production environment and can be quite complex depending on what you have. For normal DEV/TEST environments, it is fairly straightforward, but it certainly is nothing like MS Office or something, where you can blindly click next-next and then finish and forget about the installation! It is a complex enterprise application and needs proper administration on an ongoing basis.

In all cases, I have had my own set of people (belonging to a software services company) that did the implementation. In India, we have a pretty good pool of people available for this in general.

I believe there is a strong need to actually compare Remedy, Service Now and couple of open source or free to download products and bring out what really the free products can achieve vis-a-vis established product like Remedy.

As of now, this is more of a perception (Remedy is costly, Free products have less functionality etc - but hardly anyone is going to great lengths to establish point by point, module by module what really is better in which software).

There is no point in listening to such comparison done by one of the vendors (e.g. BMC Remedy communities are having several comments of how Service Now lacks several things and customers coming back to Remedy. Service Now communities are saying exactly opposite. The need is to take out this bias and put down all the facts in a proper shoot-out.

In most situations, we got involved only when customer had already made a decision to go for BMC Remedy so I can't really comment on this. But I think it is more to do with good sales pitch from BMC and the fact that it is an established tool with large enterprises that has typically tilted the scale towards BMC Remedy.

For large organisations, or a medium organisation that is now growing due to new acquisitions etc. (typically several thousand people strong and a large presence in one or more countries) BMC Remedy is surely a very good choice. For smaller organisations, there is the option of BMC Remedy-On-Demand (ROD), but then they may have cheaper alternatives - or at least options that give low starting price.